Tag: Wayne H. Davis

Kenneth Boulding? Paul Ehrlich? David Attenborough? Mancur Olson? Wayne H. Davis? Jay W. Forrester? John S. Steinhart? Anonymous?

Dear Quote Investigator: Population size, energy use, and gross domestic product (GDP) have grown exponentially for limited time periods within some nations; however, these trends are complex. Economies sometimes shrink; per-capita energy use sometimes declines; human population sometimes grows linearly. Recent projections suggest that the number of people on Earth may even plateau. An exasperated scholar once said something like this:

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.

This remark has been attributed to economist Kenneth Boulding, biologist Paul R. Ehrlich, and broadcaster David Attenborough. Would you please explore this topic?

Quote Investigator: The earliest strong match located by QI appeared in the Fall 1973 issue of the journal “Daedalus”. The general topic of the issue was “The No-Growth Society”, and the economist Mancur Olson who penned the introduction credited the remark to Kenneth Boulding. Emphasis added to excerpts by QI:^[1]1973 Fall, Daedalus, Volume 102, Number 4, Issue Theme: The No-Growth Society, Introduction by Mancur Olson Start Page 1, Quote Page 3, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts on behalf of American … Continue reading

Kenneth Boulding has said that anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. Even if one does not accept this view, it is clear that no sensible person can deny the seriousness of the possibility that current rates of economic growth cannot be sustained indefinitely because of the environmental constraint.

QI has not yet found a close match in the works of Boulding. A thematic match occurred in a presentation Boulding made to the Canadian Political Science Association in 1953:^[2]1970 (1968 Copyright), Beyond Economics: Essays on Society, Religion and Ethics by Kenneth E. Boulding, Article: Toward a General Theory of Growth (The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political … Continue reading

Continuous growth at a constant rate, however, is rare in nature and even in society. Indeed it may be stated that within the realm of common human experience all growth must run into eventually declining rates of growth. As growth proceeds, the growing object must eventually run into conditions which are less and less favourable to growth.

If this were not true there would eventually be only one object in the universe and at that point at least, unless the universe itself can grow indefinitely, its growth would have to come to an end. It is not surprising, therefore, that virtually all empirical growth curves exhibit the familiar “ogive” shape, the absolute growth being small at first, rising to a maximum, and then declining eventually to zero as the maximum value of the variable is reached.

Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.

Continue reading Anyone Who Believes Exponential Growth Can Go On Forever in a Finite World Is Either a Madman or an Economist